Quote from Ash

Christianity is indeed the acceptance of Jesus as their personal savior.

One has to believe that Jesus actually existed to accept him as their personal savior.

Jesus is a figure of the bible, and aside from the bible, we only have a very loose idea of his actual life, so loose in fact that he would hardly merit a footnote in the Bethlaham Gazette because we are so unsure of any details about him.

The versions of the bible vary so much and have so much inconsistancy, both internal and historically, that we have no way to determine even biblically the life of Jesus with any consistancy, or even if he claimed divinity.

If one uses the bible as the source of their belief in Jesus, then they have to do a few things. Either they accept the whole thing as truth, or they pick and choose what to believe.

Picking and choosing what to believe begs the question of what their criteria for judgement of the things they read. This criteria is arbitrary by definition, imposed by the interpreter.

Truth is ALWAYS absolute: either something happens or it doesn't. It cannot be open to interpretation, because that would mean that soemthing would be "in two places at once" or "in two states at once", a logical impossiblity. If the person intepreting the bible chooses that certain bits about Jesus, are true, like his teachings and life, but that his claims to divinity were false, you have to ask about his criteria, which goes back to what I was saying earlier. Normally history books are sourced and you can cross reference them to find a more accurate story, but if you only have one book, albeit one that has changed much over the millenia, then it is "take it all or leave it", because otherwise you are choosing by yourself what is true, and that is all faith.

If the person does NOT pick and choose, but opts to accept the whole bible, then they are stuck with the whole thing.


I do think that it is impossible to, in honesty, pick and choose what parts of the bible are true and which are false or alegorical. To do so is self-delusion.



So as Ogrilla says, if you say you are a Christian, but base your acceptance of Jesus' existance, what other than the BIble do you have to use as the basis of your faith? All of my arguments are pretty consistant, at least int he sense that they point towards each other, not neccessarily int he sense that they are in any way perfect.

Quote from Ash

Pretty much. It happens a lot when the basis of discussion is the usual shitty misrepresentation of science and logical fallacies.

Quote from Dragon⁰⁷⁷

As opposed to your topics of discussion, which consist almost exclusively on the shitty misrepresentation of religion and religious people. I think you put science on too high a pedestal some times.